The day Switzerland found its online voice

SWI swissinfo.ch is 20 years old today. It still fulfills the same mission as its former avatar Swiss Radio International (SRI) but by means that barely existed two decades ago. Imagine a time when there were no smartphones or tablets. Where the personal computer was too expensive for mass ownership. A time when there was no Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Only the brave dared “chat” on Yahoo’s forums. Google had just made the transition from a garage project to a company. Internet connections were still very slow and very expensive. You paid by the minute, once the modem deigned to connect to the web, often after several attempts, punctuated by the famous electronic gurgling sound of two computers getting to know each other. It was not uncommon to wait a minute to see a simple picture displayed on the screen. And video? They were some available but you had to be very, very patient. Broadband became widespread only in the year 2000 and YouTube arrived five years later. At the ...